June 18, 2013

For a city that boasts two designated tourist districts, selecting a hotel can be a little daunting. There are some brand names I recognized from previous South American travel - Melia, Golden Tulip - but as I said in my previous post, guidebooks and travel sites aren't helpful. Photographs tend to be the sort from Aussie tourists alarmed by the bug in their tub.

We ended up choosing the Brasilia Palace, which dates back to the city's founding and was designed by Oscar Niemeyer himself. When else would we have the opportunity to stay in a residential environment designed by a modern master? Plus, it was on the lake.

If we had to do it over again, I'd probably still choose to stay here. The hotel was restored after a fire in the 1970s, and like the city itself, it felt like a time capsule. Everything about it screamed midcentury modern, and they had even decorated public spaces with modernist furnishings. The rooms were small, spare, and efficient, with a balcony. There was a lovely pool area, and the breakfast - included - featured an array of fresh fruits and juices (Brazilians love their juices!), baked goods, cold cuts, hot foods, and the ubiquitous pao de queijo - little balls of cheese bread.
(These, by the way, will grow on you and make you crave them.)

But the drawbacks were these: in the beak of the "bird" that is Brasilia, the hotel is far removed from everything except Palacio Alvarado, the Niemeyer-designed presidential palace, which is stunning but not open to the public. It is also offset from the main road, meaning that cabs need to be specially called to the hotel, which adds a surcharge to every fare. (The neighboring Golden Tulip Resort, facing the main street, seemed to have frequent cab traffic.) Only one staff member - the morning concierge - spoke English. And when we were there, the on-site restaurant was severely understaffed - only four waiters (and no front-of-house support whatsoever) for a full restaurant of over 100 diners. The food, however, was pretty good.

If you are not married to living in a Niemeyer for a few days, I would recommend one of the larger hotels located where the two spines of the city intersect. They might lack midmod authenticity, but they will at least be in (treacherous) walking distance of a few major sites and the cab rides will be shorter. The Melia seemed elegant and imposing, and The Carlton had a doorman and the coolest entryway in Brazil:

Random aside: Like the fellow chatting with the doorman, most everyone is dressed for government business in Brasilia. Every morning at breakfast, we were the only people in shorts and sandals despite the 85-degree heat. Women were dressed in smart, elegant workwear, and men wore suits and ties. In the city, jeans were worn mostly by younger people, and virtually no one else wore shorts. Add to that our English and our "gosh wow" attitude toward every single building, and we were pretty much pegged as Americans by everyone.

Whatever you select, choose a hotel that includes breakfast in the rate. This is a city without a Starbucks, and you will want a Brazilian coffee, a slab of papaya, and a pao de queijo to start your day of sightseeing.

Earlier this year, when Paul and I were entertaining the modest goal of international travel to Canada, Paul stumbled upon an airfare of $550 from DFW to Rio. American Airlines had just introduced a new nonstop route, and it was about half the price of a trip to Montreal. We had long wanted to go to Brazil, so we quickly checked our work calendars, requested vacation, and bought the tickets. Then began the plotting. Where else would we go besides Rio?

I have long had a fascination with Brasilia that recently grew more intense as I have become obsessed with Broyhill Brasilia furniture. This line from the 1960s was inspired by Oscar Niemeyer's architecture in the capital city, with its parabolic curves, unprecedented gestures, and sculptural forms. As Paul and I tried to figure out what to do there - and how to do it - it became apparent that Brasilia was not a tourist destination. Guidebooks that devoted lavish spreads on Rio, Sao Paolo, and Recife treated Brasilia like a footnote, with a few photos and maybe a page and a half of text. Internet resources were equally sparse - a few reviews in Portuguese on TripAdvisor and a 1986 travel article in the New York Times. With these scant clues, we had to figure out the city for ourselves.

With this blog post, I aim to provide a few travel tips for the modern architecture enthusiast who is thinking about Brasilia. Please feel free to comment or reach out to me via email with any questions. Brasilia holds as many frustrations as it does pleasures, and my goal is to help you plan a fun and meaningful pilgrimage to this modernist fantasyland. It absolutely deserves to be seen, and it will reward you for the considerable effort you will no doubt expend.

BASICS

Brasilia was a planned city, built between 1956 and 1961 during Juscileno Kubitschek's presidency. He was the first democratically elected president of Brazil, and creating a new capital city - more centrally located than Rio - was an objective he set out to accomplish in one term. (He was afraid he would not be re-elected.) Working with urban planner Lucio Costa and principal architect Niemeyer, the city went up swiftly. The shape of the city is essentially a cross, though it is more fancifully described as everything from a bird to an angel to a butterfly. The spine of the city is where virtually all federal offices and public buildings are located. The arms contain the business district. Residential neighborhoods, for the most part, are on the outskirts, encircling the cross but separate from it. As you can imagine, this creates a peculiar dynamic in the city center: bustling by day, vacant at night. A large man-made lake, Lago Paranoa, bounds the city, but it is curiously devoid of recreation (despite a yacht club on the north end). No paths flank it, no beaches nor public docks seem to exist in the city. It's gorgeous, and helps keep the arid climate tolerable, but for the most part, it's a vast, empty backdrop. If you go to the top of the central TV tower (a Costa design) early in your stay, you will get a great sense of the city's layout.

Brasilia, like most of the places we visited in Brazil, is not the kind of place where natives learn English as a matter of course. Let me be clear: YOU MUST LEARN SOME PORTUGEUSE. Learn basic directional phrases, learn to count, familiarize yourself with food words (though some restaurants will offer an English menu even if no one on staff can speak it), and acquaint yourself with basic questions (where are the bathrooms? how much does it cost?). We had some pretty amazing games of charades with shop clerks, and between my tragically minimal Portugeuse and their eagerness to please, we managed to buy what we needed!

Most importantly, Brasilia is NOT a walkable city. You will look at a map and think, "Oh, that's not far! We can walk that!" First of all, it IS that far, and second, even if you are physically fit and adventurous, you take your life into your hands walking. Traffic abounds. Sidewalks peter out and vanish. You find yourself at an intersection facing eight lanes of traffic with no crosswalk, and you weave your way across the road like a live-action version of Frogger. Simply stated: budget for cabs. You will want to take cabs everywhere. No, really. Do not think you are above this. Take. Cabs. Everywhere.